Professional Member
Maxster,
The rate up here is $38.36hr in the envelope!!
Professional Member*
638B is out on strike down here since the new contract came out 7/1/04 national agreements can't go out(TRANE,YORK,McQUAY,CARRIER some other larger service groups also on the national)and or take others work who are out.how does your overtime work after a days work,and on the weekends.we have A teams splitting up doing B work for your rate in some of the OEMs offices.
Professional Member
Maxster,
There is no "B" rate up here ! There NEVER will be!! The national tried to jam that down our throat about 5yrs ago, that weasel Tom House tried to get us to go along with that MSCA agreement , we almost walked away from the UA over it .
The is only one rate for fitters and refrigeration people, although reefers should get more$$ and often times do we try and stick together . We are not one of the UA favorite locals. By that I mean we are pretty independent , we have our own pension, health care annuity etc. That MSCA agreement is a real shaft job for journeymen techs. JMHO
Professional Member*
thats tight then,back in late 97' the B business agents were voted out and we had the "A" BA cover us since.the B guys down here are always cutting deals with their bosses away from the union and then bitch the union has no power..i wish we were as tight as the A fitters are but the hvac owners would loose control from raises,to how OT is written by techs.
Member
I've bit my lip long enough on this thread, not wanting to really say much, but i am as disappointed in the union in the past few years as i have ever been. We have had one raise on our check in the last 6 years, a total of .76 cents. The rest of the $5.00 or so going to Health and welfare. Most recently $1.30 that was supposed to go to the check, also went to H&W.
We did get our deductible reduced from 1000 down to 500, as if that matters much. Most of our pipefitters are sitting the bench, without benie's, due to the help of George Bush. To suggest that these guy's are lazy or slacker's defies imagination, and those that would tout them as being so should spend some time there, and deny their own families the security of a weekly paycheck.
It was suggested that a temporary assesment be made to help these guy's with their non-working dues, I favored this but it was voted down. The local could make a better effort to put these guy's to work by pressuring the out of town contractor's to use our guy's and quit giving out permits like water.
There has been a change of administration at the local, and things are getting better in some area's, but the main issue's are still present at every meeting, like the smell of a dead polecat. The mention of a phone call to the higher level, gives the BA's a rash. They are way to receptive to the contractors needs and not of the rank and file. The only issue they ever want to discuss is organizing the non-union shops. I tend to favor organizing our own membership first. JMHO.
Professional Member
Where in the world can you make money like that with no overtime? Certainly not here in Southwest Ohio. Good grief! I've been putting in 50-60 hrs. a week since May
and this isn't an especially hot summer. No OT, sounds like nirvana to me . . .
Professional Member
Maxster
Maxster, the problems with MTB 638 have always been that we've had poor representation on the Business Agent front since before I can remember. The mechanics in NY are also their own worst enemies. They never go to scheduled meetings and have no idea what it's all about or what's going on. I think the recent contract was turned down by 168 members and those few members had the ability to call a work stoppage. There are thousands of MTB 638 members and where were they when the votes were counted. It will never change.
The National Association allows the owners to sign an interim agreement thus allowing their employees to work strike or no strike. I was in Manhattan on Thursday and Friday and I saw trucks from every big shop still out there working. If we could get autonomy from the A local things possibly would change but being a realist I know that will never happen. I'm a self employed member now and unfortunately have no say in all this but I was a shop steward fo 20 years and it was very frustrating to say the least. Keep the faith.
Professional Member
companys like brazil or diamond that pay 50 an hour have there catches. they only pay you ticket time, which means no travel time and you may have to work longer than 1 hour to get 1 hour of ticket time. if you have to drive to a supply house to get a part this is not ticket time. have you ever seen the prices that these commission companys charge I would rather make less and not go to hell. i know many people who worked for brazil and they say the best thing to do is quit companys like this... i tried it and didnt like it.. it is a feast or famon deal...good luck
Professional Member
dave82323
If it is an item that you should have on the truck and it's not because the warehouse man didn't have what you needed in the warehouse to stock the truck they will usually bring it out to you. If it is something that would be impractical to stock on the truck, or what not, there is usually always a task number you can use to add the time needed even for travel time.
Yes they pay per billable hour, they use a national average to arrive at the time needed to complete the task. If the task is always being completed light on hours they will adjust it and they will also adjust the time if the task is always being beat. If your competent and quick you will make more than someone that has little experience, so it's a self adjusting scale. The guy with 10 years in the trade will almost always make more than the guy with only 2 years of experience. So the new guy may be averaging 30 bucks an hour and the old guy may be making 60 or 70 per hour. The guy that completes his job first is back in the rotation for a new call, so again experience is rewarded.
I don't remember if I posted this or not here but I actually started in the trades working union, I've worked piece work, billable hours, hourly, salary, commission, and combinations of them all together at one time or another. I've also paid out on them all with my own companies with the exception of union scale in a union shop. I think I did post, I will be looking into the union for a new shop out of state probably after the first of the year.
As an employee of all the ways I've worked, I've liked billable hours the best, but I was at the top of my game and I always beat my times.
As in employer I've been beat up pretty good paying hourly, the clock is ticking your guy isn't answering the radio and then you find out later he was getting a nooner from his girlfriend on your time and going home to the wife after work. So billable hours also helps to protect the employer.
Regular Guest
For your money the one of the best places to live for wages versus cost of living is Omaha. Pipefitter scale is $28
sheet metal service tech $26.50. Nice city, bad weather
Regular Guest
$70 per hour? Seeing as how most companies bill out at about $65-$75 per hour in So Cal to the customers, that means that with expenses you've got to bill out at at least $110 per hour to see a profit. You know Mike Diamond and George Brazil have to pay a HUGE amount of money to advertise. TV and full page color ad in all phone books, so tack on another $20 per hour. You've got to be doing something crooked to be billing out at about twice the rate of everyone else.
One of my buddies who works at a parts house found a folder left by one of THOSE guys and looked inside to find out who it belonged to. After seeing the invoices inside he made a few copies and showed them to me. On an invoice for a compressor changeout, the only part listed in his confidential parts used section was one 10-370 capacitor. That job cost the customer $350. It's people like that who give the rest of us honest people in the industry a bad name.
Regular Guest
Last week mike diamond ran an ad in the Los Angeles Times,
advertising $55+ per hr for techs. Couldn't figure how they could do that, until I read these posts.
New Guest
Sure maybe there are people out there who think they would rather work non-union. Maybe they actually believe they make more money as well. But these people are foolish and completely wrong. First of all lets thank the unions for bringing you things like your WEEKEND, a lunch break, overtime, pensions, benefits higher wage scales whether you are in a union or not. Just a few examples there. If you think you make more than a union worker you are dead wrong. I was at 100 k in JUNE and i Have the pay stubs to prove it. Thats just my envelope, without benefits. I also have a pension as well as a 401k plan(two pensions people). I have full medical coverage $10 co-pay and $35 dollar co-pay for emergency room. In addittion to vision and dental coverage. For me and my entire family until my kids are in there twenties. As far as me and my wife we cover our retirees for the rest of there lives. I have a benefit fund that matches my salary when i am unemployed as well as pays my unpaid mortgage payments. I get two vacation checks a year tax free usually between 5k and 10k each depending on hours worked. Any overtime I work is double not just in the envelope but in the benefits as well. So i guess you can say I actually make around 250k a year when you ad it all up. If the contractor wasnt making money off of my back he wouldn't be paying me that salary, understand? Oh by the way we have no hiring hall so you get hired on your name in my local in NY. So i guess there goes your theory about us doing nothing. If i did nothing I wouldn,t be working. By the way I just graduated the apprenticeship program 2 yrs ago. So keep thinking you make more than me doing non-union work. the only one getting rich is your boss off of your back. Do the math you dont have to be a genius to figure it out. By the way i went to college for 4 yrs and i make more money doing construction than the jobs that were out there for college grads. If you would rather be taken advantage of feel free by all means.
Professional Member*
union or non union????????........JackOriginally Posted by ali10
Professional Member
Look at the post date, they're probably divorced by now.
Regular Guest
HEY ENZOROCK beinging raised in a ITALIAN in brooklyn with uncles in local#3 and the rest of the family with a differant local # UNIONS HAVE OUT GROWN THEIR USEFULLNESS . And by the way I bet your B.A make twice as much as you do for doing less work than you and dosn't have to be productive like you so make sure you show up monday for work your B.A needs his job.
Regular Guest
That is one hell of a package. If the average worker does 2080 hours per year... and you were at 100k in June... that puts you at about $96.00 per hour. Unless, of course, you work a crapload of OT. Union J-men start at $29.76 per hour here in the Plumbers/S-Fitters local. Sheetmetal local is a little less. Good service techs usually pull in about $35.00-$50.00 with chiller guys being in high demand. The guys who want to work and are at the top of their game make the good money. I'm not sure what the Union correlation is to the holidays and vacation because our local does not offer either. It is up to the employer and employee to hash that out. Again, the guys in demand can usually name what they want and get it. I don't know what your cost of living is but $200,000 per year on the check is fantastic. You have to be one of the best in order to get that kind of cash. Something tells me you could succeed even if you didn't have your union. Union training is second to none and the bennies are great. You sound like you have it made in the shade. I don't think it works that way for everyone in the union. My brother is a union carpenter, my uncle is a union electrician, my brother in law is a union fitter and I out earn all of them. I work an average of 50 hrs per week. I get 3 weeks paid vacation and decent insurance.(Nothing like yours) Thank God my wife carries great insurance for her and the kids. I do have a 401k but its not great. My wife and I invest ourselves and I think we are going to be OK. Sounds like you have a wonderful job but don't think its like that for everyone who is union.
As for your boss making money off your backs, do you think your BA is starving? Do you think whoever owns the company you work for is hurting? Trust me, when you are getting contracts to build hospitals, high rise office buildings, football stadiums etc....its a whole different ball of wax from the dude slappin furnaces in houses. It takes millions of dollars to even be considered for jobs like that. Thats how they can afford to pay you 200,000 per year. Do you think they could afford to pay you that doing residential work? Your boss is getting stinkin filthy rich off your labor and you are getting a bone. It just happens to be alot larger that the average Joe.
How can unions afford to throw billions of dollars at Democrats every year? Because they are LOADED!
Regular Guest
go to arca web site and check... you should have a link to it on his locals site.
Professional Member
2004
Thought I'd offer a little info and an update since 2004' on these bandits. Maybe I shouldn't say that since this is a capitalist economy, and if you can talk someone into paying $700. to replace a 90 in their water line, or walk up to a unit, kick it, say you need a new one, and still sleep at night, thats the way it is. Or so I was told.Last week mike diamond ran an ad in the Los Angeles Times,
advertising $55+ per hr for techs. Couldn't figure how they could do that, until I read these posts.
Diamond and brazil are basically the same company, or might as well be. Diamond bought into or bought accounts from brazil. Use the same style trucks, and likely the same style tricks. I cannot say for certain, but my understanding of the operation goes like this:
All commission pay, you buy the stock on the truck from the co., you sell it for whatever you can get away with and pocket the difference. Don't know how or if their hourly works. Might be a keep whatever you can get above $xxx. flat fee or quote. And that they prefer replacement to repair, regardless of the problem.
They had been operating in LA since its beginning, and only started working Orange county more around 1995. Started getting bigger for a short time, then started shrinking possibly due to OC residents higher financial savvy. Took a major hit when george B croaked a while back and his two sons started fighting over his assets, leaving the company to run itself. (Or fighting over the company and getting nothing done) Either way, their trucks are rarely seen by me anymore, when it used to be once or twice a day. With the occasional Diamond mobile spotted about half as often as before, which wasn't that much to begin with.
However Diamonds latest radio spot might convince folks they're not gonna get ripped off cause, “Our techs will never come to your home smelling bad” or something like that. Must not know if somebody says you stink, they don't necessarily mean BO. Don't know why cause I never had a complaint made about me, due to working up a dirty sweat on a customers behalf.
New Guest
Hi, ON_CALL actually i make more than my buissness agents and with the current boom in nyc alot of steamfitters make more than our b.a's. As far as local 3, you are right they went from first to worst in a hurry. The primal reason that a union like them can do an about face is good old american greed. They went away from their core. First off their union gave out(sold) too many books. They currently have 16,000 members thats is why they must go on furlo every year. Most leckys are out of work half the year. The local now is the complete opposite of what one of organized labor's greatest leaders envisioned when he was president of local 3 Harry Van Arsdale. Mr. Van Arsdale lived his life on the ideal of unionism. He actually cut his own pension in half after he retired. He didn't think he deserved to make as much money ritered as a working man did, he actually died broke. Local 3 now thinks like a buissness instead of a union. They look to make profits on real estate and other ventures. They no longer think like a union. For the other poster we work 35 hrs a week in my local from 7am to 2 pm. Anything outside of those hrs is double. Saturday and sudays are a double and anything from 2pm to 7 am is double. If i have a nightshift instead of a day shift and i start at 2pm every single hour i work is double thats why we make so much money. My local is one of the most powerful and politically active in the entire country. They have not become useless as on-call seems to believe. I also work residential and recieve the same salary. You have to remember a 1 bedroom condo is 1 million dollars in the city so the money is there. As far as the contractor making money off of my back........ of course he is thats what i want. I want to be a profitable employee thats what a good union man wants. The more money I make for him the more money I can ask of him. We want the owners to make a profit, they wouldnt be in buissness if they didnt. Just as a group, as a union you can demand a larger cut of the pie.
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